10 Ways to Live a Miserable Life, According to Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger was famous for thinking backwards. Where most people ask, “How can I succeed? » Munger preferred to ask: “How can I guarantee failure?” » so avoid it. He called this approach “inversion” and applied it to almost every problem he encountered.

Nowhere did he use it more memorably than in his 1986 commencement speech, which he later titled “How to Guarantee a Life of Misery.” Munger attributed the structure to Johnny Carson, who told an earlier commencement audience that he couldn’t give them a formula for happiness, but he could give them one for misery.

Munger took Carson’s framework, kept three of his prescriptions, and added five more. The message was always the same: study the guaranteed path to misery, then avoid every step on it.

Here are 10 ways Munger thought a person could guarantee he would suffer, taken from his 1986 speech and reinforced by two more decades of his interviews, shareholder letters and public remarks.

1. Ingest chemicals that alter your brain

It was the first of Johnny Carson’s three prescriptions, and Munger kept it at the top of his list without hesitation. According to Munger, alcohol and drugs reliably destroy the faculties a person needs to think clearly, build relationships, and maintain discipline—the damage gradually worsens until it becomes irreversible.

Munger observed that chemical dependency is one of the few reliable ways to take a person with true abilities and reduce them to nothing. It bypasses almost all other strengths a person has and removes the ability for self-correction. He called it a “trap door” in life from which few people who fail are able to escape.

2. Cultivate the desire

Carson’s second prescription was desire, and Munger enthusiastically agreed. Munger considered envy not only unpleasant, but also a self-destructive vice, because it offers absolutely nothing in return to the person experiencing it.

“Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you can never have fun with. There’s a lot of pain and no pleasure. Why would you want to ride that streetcar?” Comparing yourself to those who have produced more suffering, without productive results and without a path to resolution.

3. Resentment of the nurse

Carson’s third prescription was resentment, and Munger treated it as almost as destructive as envy. Resentment keeps a person permanently anchored to past wrongs, real or imagined, and consumes mental energy that could be directed toward progress.

Munger often pointed out that people who harbor resentment primarily hurt themselves. The person or situation that causes resentment rarely suffers at all. The resentful person volunteers to carry a heavy weight indefinitely, often for decades, while the world moves on without them.

4. Don’t be reliable

It was Munger himself’s addition to Carson’s list, and he saw it as an almost surefire path to ruin. A person who cannot be counted on to do what they say they will do destroys trust, damages relationships, and shuts down opportunities one by one until very few remain.

“If you’re not reliable, it doesn’t matter how good you are. Reliability is everything.” Munger argued that raw talent without reliability is almost worthless in the long run, while reliability without exceptional talent still produces a useful and respected life.

5. Learn only from your own personal experience

Munger considered this to be one of the most useless ways for a person to develop wisdom. Direct personal experience is an extraordinarily slow and painful way to acquire knowledge when all of humanity’s accumulated experience is available through books, history, and careful observation of others.

“In all my life, I have never known a wise man who didn’t read all the time. None. Zero.” A person who insists on learning only what he personally encounters will repeat mistakes already made and solved thousands of times. They will come to conclusions the hard way as others have already done, and they will often arrive too late.

6. Get Down and Stay Down After a Setback

Munger described self-pity after failure as one of the most reliable drivers of prolonged misery. Every life contains serious setbacks. The variable is whether a person treats these setbacks as data to learn from or as proof that further effort is futile.

“Life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows. It doesn’t matter. Some people get over it, and some people don’t. And here I think Epictetus’ attitude is the best. He thought that every misfortune in life was an opportunity to behave well.” The person who wallows in self-pity after adversity and stays there has chosen a form of suffering that never ends.

7. Ignore the wisdom of the dead

Munger was a keen student of history and biography precisely because he understood how much hard-won wisdom existed in the stories of other people’s lives. He considered not taking an interest in this issue as a form of deliberate impoverishment.

The great advantage of the study of history is that it allows a person to conduct thousands of vicarious experiments, at no personal cost, in all areas of human activity. According to Munger, a person who ignores all of this and relies only on what is immediately around him begins life with a serious, self-imposed disability that gets worse with time.

8. Leave confirmation bias unchallenged

Munger argued that the human tendency to seek evidence that confirms existing beliefs and reject evidence that contradicts them is one of the primary sources of poor decisions in all areas. Most people reinforce what they already think rather than actively try to refute it.

“I never allow myself to have an opinion on something where I don’t know the other side’s arguments better than they do.” A person who never deliberately seeks out the strongest arguments against his or her own beliefs will accumulate errors without ever recognizing them.

9. Ignoring incentives

After decades of observing businesses, institutions, and individuals, Munger concluded that incentive structures explain the vast majority of human behavior that otherwise appears irrational or corrupt. People who don’t understand this routinely misinterpret situations, mistrust, and are repeatedly blinded by predictable outcomes.

“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the result.” Whether evaluating a financial advisor, a business partner, a doctor or a politician, anyone who ignores the incentives actually in place will be fooled by the stated intentions and miss the real driving forces. This mistake, made consistently, produces a life full of avoidable betrayals and failed predictions.

10. Avoid difficult truths to protect your comfort

Munger reserved particular contempt for self-deception, which he viewed as a willful form of self-deception that prevents a person from correctly diagnosing their own situation. People who refuse to face uncomfortable facts about themselves, their choices, or their circumstances can’t fix what they don’t want to acknowledge.

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that it is not necessary, almost everyone is concerned with the proof.” A life built on comfortable illusions requires constant maintenance and is perpetually vulnerable to reality. The person who trains himself to face hard truths early on suffers far less than the person who puts them off until they can no longer be avoided.

Conclusion

What made Munger’s 1986 speech so powerful is the same thing that makes inversion powerful in general. It is much easier to identify reliable causes of failure than to prescribe a universal path to success. Success takes many paths. Misery has a surprisingly short list of reliable ramps.

Munger’s prescription was simple: study the list, memorize it, and spend your life avoiding every item on it. Ingratitude, envy, resentment, unreliability, intellectual laziness, self-pity, historical ignorance, cognitive bias, incentive blindness, and self-deception are not random misfortunes.

These are choices, made repeatedly, that accumulate over a lifetime. He who systematically avoids them has already cleared the most common paths to ruin, and that, Munger thought, is the essential work.